Posts Tagged ‘Davey Wreden’

About a year ago I interviewed Davey Wreden and William Pugh about the architecture of The Stanley Parable but never published the article. I’d been thinking about how the game intertwines narration and level design for a while, but it was a gif which finally converted solo pondering into getting the pair on Skype. Here’s what happened when Wreden and Pugh dug into the ideas behind The Stanley Parable’s disorienting and utterly impossible building.

Struggling with success is always a hard sell for empathy. It’s all too easy to dismiss such expressions with an easy, “Oh, you poor rich thing.” But it is, of course, far more complicated than that.

Davey Wreden, co-creator of The Stanley Parable, has already written in detail about how phenomenon of his game has personally affected him, in an eloquent blog post last month. Since the release of The Stanley Parable, and its remarkable success, the lives of both of its creators have been turned upside down. At 25 and 20 years old, Davey Wreden and William Pugh, haven’t had an easy time. I spoke with them about their last six months, how the reaction to the game has affected them and their partnership, and how they’re dealing with it all. And Pugh’s desire to create a rivalry with Steve Gaynor.

The Stanley Parable is strange. The Stanley Parable is smart, calculated. The Stanley Parable is pure chaos. The Stanley Parable is about so very, very many things – at least, until it decides to be not about them at all, often in the same breath. I’ll be straight with you: reviewing this thing in any conventional fashion is more or less impossible. Yes, at heart it’s a first-person adventure born of a highly acclaimed Half-Life 2 mod, but it’s also far, far more. A tangled web of surprises and secrets, a madman’s ransom collage of endings and fresh starts. And so, in the spirit of The Stanley Parable, I have decided to let you choose how you’d like to see the game reviewed. Well, if you’d even call these meaningful choices, let alone important ones. Er, sorry about that. Been playing too much Stanley Parable. You know how it is.

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 5 of 7.

When Davey Wreden made The Stanley Parable, a Source mod about the dissonance between game narrative and free will (among other things), it quickly went viral and surprised a mod community that thought Source mods were already dead. Now, he’s currently collaborating on an extended remake / reboot of The Stanley Parable and other projects.Read the rest of this entry »